Flower Colours - Be Daring - Any Colour Goes
When it comes to flowering plants, is there such a thing as a colour combination that doesn’t work? If there is, I haven’t found it! Colours that may perhaps look a little uncomfortable side-by-side on an artists’ canvas seem perfectly happy when it comes to flowers. The moral is - any colour goes. Let me know what you think in the comments box at the end of the blog.
Wonderful roses, currently in full flower – some of which will keep flowering until Xmas in the magical Morayshire microclimate; multi-coloured snapdragons; acid-yellow mound-forming Alchemilla mollis; Geraniums; Cistus; wallflowers and many more plants out-of-shot, together bringing most colours of the rainbow to this small cottage garden.
Plant What You Like To See
This approach should be of comfort to any gardeners who just like to grow plants for the sake of it … to simply enjoy watching what they bring. Of course it is possible to curate a flower bed, creating colourful themes and combinations – probably most people’s first approach to filling their borders. And this was, after all, how SeeHow ‘Flowering and Growing Guides’ sprang into life – as quick ‘plant visualisers’ reminding me how individual plants grow throughout the whole year – foliage as well as flowers. Gardens are dynamic places! If you do want to colour-theme your garden, SeeHow is the perfect tool. But if you just want to know how a single plant will grow month-by-month, SeeHow growing guides are perfect for that too.
Nepeta; multicoloured snapdragons; delphiniums; Alchemilla mollis; roses; Verbascum; Brachyglottis, all play their part in creating a tiny bed full of colour and structure. As some flowers like lupins begin to fade, so others, like Crocosmia lucifer come into flower.
What used to be a Small Gravel Patch Edged in Concrete
In my own small garden, I have long-since ceased to worry about curating garden flower-colour. My aim is simply to enjoy having flowers in my garden for as many months of the year as possible, regardless of colour. In fact, the more colour combinations, the better! Again, SeeHow Growing and Flowering Guides are perfect for this as they also show where there will be colour-gaps during the year, making it easier to select plants specifically to fill them.
The small gravel bed also includes some plants grown mainly for their foliage such as the evergreen privet hedging along the garden wall, deciduous ferns, hostas and sedums.
A Place for Colour-Themed Borders
Creating my colourful jumble doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy colour-themed gardens. I do! I was reminded of this during a recent visit to a very large walled garden that provides fruit and veg for sale and for a nearby restaurant as well as cut flowers. Some of the flower beds are specifically colour-themed and they look fabulous just because of this. Probably, the sheer size of the beds helps with their visual success, providing great splashes of themed colour – something most of us cannot replicate in our own smaller gardens.
Yellows, creams, whites combine with green and silver-grey foliage - Pycnosorus globosus is the star in the above border. This Australian native is especially effective ‘en masse’ but could work equally well as a clump in smaller herbaceous borders.
Knautia macedonica, Geraniums, different Paonias and plants - the curated bed mixes pinks, mauves, and blues with a chaotic assortment of green leaves and wiry stems, together making up a beautiful border attracting lots of bees, butterflies and other insects a well as many admiring humans!
The paeonies were luxuriantly beautiful and would also work well as individual plants in any smaller herbaceous border.
Let Flower Colour Chaos into Your gardens
My suggestion, for those readers with smaller gardens, is to consider forgetting about colour-theming which can be enjoyed at many large publicly accessible gardens where the borders are bigger. There will be lots of ideas to be picked up regarding specific plant choices. Instead, why not enjoy as many different varieties of plants and flowers for as long as possible. Remember, any colour goes!
Linaria purpurea, Spirea, a climbing rose, Verbascum with yellow spike, 2 colours of Campanula, Heuchera, bright orange Geums and blue Geraniums together make an eclectic but beautiful colourful mix growing through what was once a small gravel parking bay. Earlier in the year the same bed had mixed clumps daffodils, snowdrops, Muscari and bluebells
Happy ‘Any Colour Goes’ gardening, from SeeHow
The above Photographs and Text are copyright of Wincenty (Wicek) Sosna. Please contact SeeHow (07939 226417) for permission to reproduce in any way, in part or as the complete text.
Wicek, now semi-retired, is a multi-award-winning architect. He is also a writer, horticulturalist and keen gardener. He lives in Macduff on the dramatic north Aberdeenshire coast. He invented the unique interactive SeeHow – Growing Guides concept, which actually shows gardeners how plants and veg grow throughout the calendar-year. Because SeeHow Growing Guides work visually, anyone can use them - from school children to garden design professionals. Pictures really are worth 1,000 words!
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